Like a lot of terminology, “agile development” and “agile testing” mean different things to different people. In this chapter, the authors explain their view of agile, which reflects the Agile Manifesto and general principles and values shared by different agile methods. They want to share a common language with you, the reader, so they’ll go over some of our vocabulary. They compare and contrast agile development and testing with the more traditional phased approach. The “whole team” approach promoted by agile development is central to their attitude toward quality and testing, so they also talk about that here.

This chapter is from the book

Agile Values

“Agile” is a buzzword that will probably fall out of use someday and make this book seem obsolete. It’s loaded with different meanings that apply in different circumstances. One way to define “agile development” is to look at the Agile Manifesto (see Figure 1-1).

Using the values from the Manifesto to guide us, we strive to deliver small chunks of business value in extremely short release cycles.

We use the word “agile” in this book in a broad sense. Whether your team is practicing a particular agile method, such as Scrum, XP, Crystal, DSDM, or FDD, to name a few, or just adopting whatever principles and practices make sense for your situation, you should be able to apply the ideas in this book. If you’re delivering value to the business in a timely manner with high-quality software, and your team continually strives to improve, you’ll find useful information here. At the same time, there are particular agile practices we feel are crucial to any team’s success. We’ll talk about these throughout the book.